I was chatting with Greg Hickman over Instagram and he asked about my review and planning structures.He shared a story on his daily, weekly, quarterly and yearly reviews and was open about which ones he’s still working on getting better at and that sparked the conversation.I thought that since I’ve spoken about how important and what I do in my weekly reviews, I’d share with you today the exact structure, the framework if you will, of all my reviews.
Look back
Look ahead
Execute
It’s a simple framework to remember and stems a bit from the GTD methodology. But see what works for you.Look back on the week. Review the sales pipeline. Clients and cash is lifeblood of your business. You have to be ridiculously involved in it even when you are heads down in a project.Supplemental to this is looking back on the revenue. This is essential to see how much came in to the business.You know when you are doing well and when you aren’t. Even if it’s a week where $0 come in, if you do this look back every week, you’ll see patterns and trends in your business. If those normal patterns of income change, that’s when maybe you could adjust what you do based on your activity based selling.I run through my email with the Inbox Zero methodology. This is something I try to do the times I check my email during the day, but there are times when by the weekend I haven’t fully cleaned it out.Look back on the calls and meetings I had as well to refresh my memory on what was done, talked about, and see if any priorities came up that need to be accounted for.This also means gathering up all the stickies, notes, and things sitting in my Inbox in Todoist. Seeing if I need to file anything if I haven’t already.Look ahead on the weekI pull up my calendar, which I use Google Calendar to see what’s planned for the week. Every single appointment, personal and professional goes in there.Then take all those and write them down into my weekly desk planner. This allows me to visually see what the overall day and week look like. It forces me to not over schedule and be mindful of the energy I have on any given day.Then I go into my project management tool and schedule any tasks on the dedicated days if needed. Most of the time they are planned already, but if adjustments need to be made, this is when that happens.Finally I look at the long-term projects and if they are already started, I make sure that at some level, the needle on them is moving forward. If it’s a busy week, then I fit in some smaller tasks in between everything else to keep the momentum going.Execute on the weekI take a final review of what the week looks like to make sure I didn’t overload any of the days. I try to make sure that I don’t work on more than 3 high energy tasks per day.Before I get up from my weekly review, I plan out what Monday morning will look like. This way when I get up Monday, I’m not looking around for something to do. I’m sitting down ready to tackle something.It’s a simple framework to remember, especially for any review that you do. In the next episode I’ll share with you my monthly review.-------------------? For full show notes to this episode & more resources for you.-------------------